One other separate issue from the Spring Break Day 8 announcement I think bears mentioning is the FAQ.

I already talked about the second question in the previous post in this series, but the first question in this announcement is its own folly.

Q: You said everything in the Hype Train was free!?
A: Did you even read the Hype Train website? Yes, everything that was announced in the Hype Train has been released for free thus far, with the final free release coming out tomorrow. We threw this in as a bonus to those who are interested in indie multiplayer games. We think it’s a cool collaboration and hope you will too.

This hypothetical Q and A is not only worded rather rudely, and it tries to reassign blame for the inevitable upset the day’s content will bring.

Someone searched for this and because I am a goddamn hero, I will tell you how. But I’m going to assume you’ve already been to HLDJ‘s website and already know the technical aspects of installing and using their add-on and also the etiquette thereof so you don’t get banned from all your favorite servers.

You need to stop with the packaged action figures. It’s sending all the wrong signals.

I see a lot of “nerd” rooms that have action figures, still in their boxes, on display like they were cherished tchotchkes. It is my assumption that aside from declaring loudly and proudly that you like nerdy shit, the intention behind this is to convey a sense of fun and childlike whimsy to your visitors. Because who but a fun person would collect Legends of the WWF toys or obscure DC superhero action figures?

But “fun” is not what piles upon piles of toys you cannot play with suggests.

Let’s talk about that respite from brokeness, limited options, and fear of commitment to a style: eclectic decor.

It’s been around forever, I’m sure, but the most famous and popularizing example of it is probably Monica Geller’s apartment in the TV show, Friends. Monica’s home is full of mismatched furniture, different wood grains and stains, and knickknacks everywhere. It’s busy as hell and there’s shit every way you look.

It’s been a good long while since Robotic Boogaloo, the first (and thus far only) community-created update, and I’ve been thinking about it lately. The update never sat well with me and even if we don’t all agree that the update wasn’t that great, we should all acknowledge it wasn’t well-received. But I don’t feel that should be the end of community-created updates. I think the TF2 community can and does do better. If we want community updates to be a thing that people celebrate on the same level as normal Valve updates, though, they need to BE on the same level as a Valve update, as opposed to being a thing of people seeing one is out and thinking “Aw fuck, hat glurge”. The next one, if there is a next one, is gonna have to really knock it out of the park to prove this is a thing worth doing on the regular.

It’s easy as hell if your game launches with an .exe file, as most games these days do. But what about older shit? Or ROM dumps? Steam doesn’t permit importing of most proprietary formats just by the usual way, nor links to webpages. As such, how to launch browser games or anything in an emulator, especially the clusterfucks that are DOS-based games, is not something readily obvious in Steam.

So I was real !!! about A Merry Payday Christmas and I decided to watch the Payday web series, which I had known was a thing but had never bothered with before. This is a series of short episodes that elaborate on the Payday story, such as it is. Or maybe it’s some sort of alternate reality thing, which is my sincere hope and what I’m going to blissfully assume.

So the first three minutes and change of this movie is a mixture “look at this concert and our visual effects skills” and a montage of magazine covers, quick scenes, and global concert footage establishing that Barbie (and to a lesser extent, the Rockers) are the hottest shit that ever shat.